“Soon know what”
FROM HIS ELEVATED POSITION, Ryan could see above the shimmering mass of insects to where the trail emerged onto the bare top of the hill.
There was so much noise from the besieging insects that he didn’t hear the approach of the others. The first he knew was when he saw the two heads, one snow white, the other flaming crimson, appear out of the trees.
He instantly fired another shot into the creatures, backing it up with a warning yell.
“Look out! Killer bugs! Hundreds of them!”
KRYSTY AND JAK HAD BOTH stopped dead in their tracks at the fourth shot, spotting Ryan clinging perilously to the broken length of iron. Almost immediately they saw the peril, surging around beneath their trapped friend.
“Holy fuck!” Jak breathed. “Look at them.”
“I’m looking, for Gaia’s sake.” She called to Ryan. “Hang on there, lover.”
“I’m hanging. Where are the others?” The new voices had distracted the centipedes, and some of them on the fringes lifted the upper parts of their bodies from the ground. The sharp planes of their faces turned from side to side as they tried to locate the source of the fresh sounds, their antennae twitching.
Krysty looked around as she heard J.B. panting toward her, Mildred still a few yards behind him.
“Watch it,” she warned. “There’s an army of mutie insects got Ryan treed.”
The Armorer took in the situation at a single, raking glance. “Be nice to have some gas or some grens. But we don’t so we gotta find another way out.”
Mildred was painfully out of breath, doubled over with cramps, sweat dripping from her chin. She took one look at the glittering, poisonous horde and shook her head. “Jesus! How’re we ?”
Ryan swung the panga in a hissing arc, neatly beheading the huge insect that was climbing toward him, leaving its scaled corpse to scrabble down among the others, who, jaws clicking, promptly began to eat it.
Farther down the slope, they could all hear Doc lumbering toward them. “I can and I will. I can and I will. I can and I will.” He repeated it like a mantra to draw him up to the top.
When he joined them he stared fuzzily at Ryan’s predicament and promptly dropped to hands and knees, retching up yellow bile, his nose beginning to bleed with all the effort he’d put into the sharp climb.
“Any ideas, bro?” J.B. shouted to Ryan.
“Only one. Have to distract them enough for me to jump and run for it.”
“They’ll come after you. After us.”
Ryan nodded. “Looks like Doc and Mildred aren’t in great shape for another canter.”
“Give me five,” the woman said, standing up a little shakily.
Doc was also on his feet again, his face as pale as parchment, his swallow’s-eye kerchief pressed to his nose. His voice was shaky and muffled. “If the choice is running or being engulfed and devoured by that hellish mass of metallic death, then I guess that my heels will sprout wings.”
Ryan felt the girder suddenly shift a little under his grip and peered down. He saw to his horror that some of the insects were busily burrowing into the dry earth, searching out the buried foundations of the old watchtower to undermine it and bring it toppling down.
And him with it.
“Better be quick,” he yelled. “Bastards are going to have this down in a minute or two.”
J.B. closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating all his attention on the military problem, opening them again. “Doc, set off now, back down the hill. Dark night! Don’t argue. Can’t do anything here. Mildred. Go with him. Now.”
Without a word of argument, Mildred took the old man by the elbow and led him away, back over the brink of the hill, moving hastily to the right as half a dozen late-coming centipedes appeared on the trail.
Ryan felt the girder drop another couple of inches. “Time’s running,” he called.
“Going to empty a clip from the Uzi. Spray it to try and lay down a narrow corridor of dead. Moment I finish shooting, you come a’running, Ryan. All right?”